Reese Halter: Heatwaves from Australia to the North Pole

PHOTO CREDIT: RICHMOND VALLEY COUNCIL

Richmond Valley Council workers removing dead bats on Tuesday morning following the weekend heatwave. 

by Reese Halter, The Huffington Post, February 15, 2017

The unintended consequences of pumping heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere 10 times faster than the previous 66 million years are heatwaves.

Heatwaves in Australia are becoming hotter by 1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit and longer from 3 days to more than 6 days, and they are more frequent. All Australian capital cities, where the majority of the people live, are at risk from the increasing severity and intensity of heatwaves and catastrophic firestorms.

It’s not just the elderly, children, and outdoor workers who are at immediate risk. The latest massive heatwave that spread across huge swathes of eastern Australia killed thousands of flying foxes. From Adelaide, South Australia, to North Coast, New South Wales, these exquisite pollinators and insectivores fell out of trees and perished from heat exhaustion.

According to my colleague Dr Sarah Perkins-Fitzpatrick at the University of New South Wales, Sydney: “Usually you would only get this kind of extreme heat if it was an El Nino summer. The most recent El Nino phenomenon ended in mid 2016.”

Man-made heat, infused into the oceans from climate-altering fossil fuels, has doubled since 1997. That’s the equivalent energy of detonating one atomic Hiroshima-style bomb every second for 75 straight years.

Last Friday, the North Pole was 50F above normal as warm tropical air descended in the area above 80 degrees north latitude, the Arctic Circle. It’s the third heatwave this winter. In the past, Arctic heatwaves have been recorded once or twice a decade. The Arctic was missing a staggering area of sea ice in January. It’s a record-breaking area, equivalent to roughly two times the size of France.

The exposed Arctic Ocean is pumping latent heat into the polar atmosphere which, in part, is affecting the polar jet stream as it is meandering farther south than normal. In December 2015, that wandering polar jet stream was implicated in torrential flooding in the UK, the worst on record.

This year, extreme weather brought floods and frost into Spain’s Murcia Region that supplies approximately 80% of certain types of produce to the UK during the winter. Fields of millions of plants of lettuce, broccoli, zucchinis, and eggplant were spoiled. As a result, the UK experienced shortages on some supermarket shelves, causing the price of romaine lettuce to soar by 300%.

Meanwhile in the US, a strong Pacific jet stream dropping mega amounts of precipitation onto California and stressing its aging dams, i.e., Oroville, has also been shoving mild Pacific air down slope onto the Southern Rockies and eastward across the lower half of the nation. Over the weekend, temperatures in some parts of America resembled those of July rather than February. On Friday, Denver, Colorado, it was 80 F; on Saturday, in Magnum, Oklahoma, it was 99F; and on Sunday, in Norfolk, Virginia, it was 82F.

Trees (including food-bearing trees and shrubs) from New Mexico to Virginia and southward to the Gulf of Mexico responded by flowering and leafing three weeks ahead of time. They are now at risk for frost damage, which could jeopardize the US fall food supply.

Heatwaves and other extreme weather as well as dying honeybees are a wake-up call for global food security.

It’s time to end all fossil fuel subsidies immediately and follow China’s $370 billion (USD) investment in creating 13 million new jobs in the renewable energy sector.

The only way to contend with the climate in crisis is to tackle it head on - not to subsidize the biggest, wealthiest polluters to hasten the planet’s demise.

At the end of the day, it’s about survival and preventing our planet from becoming inhospitable. We require 80% renewable energies by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

#ResistRejectDenial

Earth Doctor Reese Halter’s upcoming book is “Save Nature Now.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/heatwaves-australia-to-the-north-pole_us_58a4fa79e4b026a89a7a264b

John Abraham: The gutting of CSIRO climate change research is a big mistake

To be able to adapt to climate change, we need scientists to project how the climate will change

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull arrives to announce his Innovation [really?] Statement at the Discovery Centre at the CSIRO in Canberra on Monday, December 7, 2015. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

by John Abraham, "Climate Consensus - The 97%," The Guardian, February 10, 2016

Last week, surprise news shocked the world’s scientific community. One of the most prestigious and productive scientific organizations is slashing hundreds of jobs, many related to climate change research. The organization, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO for short) is simply put, one of the best in the world. It rivals well-known groups like NASA, NOAA, and the Hadley Centre for its contributions to climate science.

What does CSIRO do that is so special? Many things. For instance, they are world leaders in measuring what is happening to the planet. Their research includes ocean-going vessels and other instrumentation that measure the chemistry and temperature of the ocean: they help track where human-emitted carbon dioxide is going, how heat is building up in the oceans, and what is happening with the general health of the ocean biosystem.

CSIRO is also a modeling superpower. Their climate models form the backbone of our understanding of what changes have happened and what changes will happen because of human greenhouse gases.

But they also have deepened our knowledge about extreme weather. They’ve provided insights regarding how droughts, heat waves, and floods will change in the future.

All of these contributions are important not only for the understanding that they provide but also because this knowledge helps us plan for the future. If you want to know what we can do to mitigate or adapt to climate change, you need this information.

But according to CSIRO chief executive, Larry Marshall, CSIRO should shift focus. Here is the key statement he made last week:

Our climate models are among the best in the world and our measurements honed those models to prove global climate change. That question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with?

Are you kidding me? What kind of backward logic is this? From the reports I’ve read, something like 350 positions will be cut from CSIRO with the heaviest cuts (over 100) coming from the climate research groups. How can you predict how to adapt if you don’t know what you are going to adapt to? This doesn’t make sense. 

Sure, I have colleagues at CSIRO (who I also consider friends). Sure I don’t want them to lose their jobs. But, the real reason this foolish move upsets me is that it forces decision-makers to fly with blinders on as they make decisions for our future. How fast will the planet warm? What will the impacts be? How will it change weather patterns? How will those weather patterns affect the Earth’s biological systems? All of these questions and more will be harder to answer after these cuts. 

Australia is a small country (by population). Yet, it has punched far above its weight class in research. To think that this treasure of a research organization will be gutted is just shocking.

This story has gotten a lot of press in Australia such as here and here. It is also covered in international venues such as here and petitions such as here and here. Let’s hope this move is reversed before it is too late.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/feb/10/the-gutting-of-csiro-climate-change-research-is-a-big-mistake 

Stefan Rahmstorf, SMH: Australia must step up on emission cuts to rejoin world's enlightened countries

The climate change goal posts have long been changing everywhere, except Australia

A polar bear on the ice floe in Baffin Bay above the Arctic circle, where the ice is melting.

by Stefan Rahmstorf, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 5, 2015

As an oceanographer and climate researcher, I have mapped plenty of alarming trends over the past few decades. But I am confident that humanity has the capability, capacity and means to keep the increase in global temperatures below the potentially catastrophic threshold of 2 degrees. And I am also cautiously optimistic that a meaningful global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions will emerge from the upcoming Paris talks.

From an Australian perspective this might seem fanciful. But virtually everywhere else in the world, the climate change goal posts have long been shifting.

It's now half a century since the first official scientific report, published in November 1965 by scientific advisors to US President Lyndon Johnson, warned that rising greenhouse gas emissions would cause global warming that "could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings." The predictions of that report, based on sound physical science, have turned out to be true. And despite myriad entrenched vested interests worldwide we are finally making headway in moving away from fossil fuels, the root cause of the unfolding climate crisis.

Professor Stefan Rahmstorf.

My own country, Germany, moved early and wagered much public, private and political capital on a transformation to a modern sustainable economy. Today, our emissions are 27% below 1990 levels while our GDP has almost doubled. The European Union as a whole has likewise grown its economy while reducing its emissions by about a fifth. We've effectively debunked the myth that reducing emissions harms the economy. Innovation and ingenuity seldom do.

And it's not just a European story. Worldwide, 19% of our energy now comes from renewable sources and growth in these industries is exponential, not linear. Last year half of all global energy investments were in renewables, led by China. This momentum suggests that investments in fossil fuels will collapse worldwide in the coming years as investors realise they'd risk massive stranded assets.

The numbers are also in on the true costs of transitioning to renewable energy worldwide. We can afford it. About US$500 billion a year is spent looking for new fossil fuel deposits. That's about the same amount of money we need to invest in renewable energy to keep global warming below 2 degrees. On top of that there's some US$500 billion in various government subsidies to fossil fuels.

The many economic studies reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it clearly: the cost of keeping global warming to below 2 degrees would reduce global economic growth by just 0.06% a year. The expected 8-fold increase in global wealth by the year 2100 achieved by assuming a typical 2.3% annual growth would be reached just two years later. Against this, the human and economic costs of "business as usual" as oceans acidify, weather extremes intensify, crops fail, and sea levels rise are virtually incalculable.

If the technology and economics are in place, that leave politics standing in our way. But as a German, I've seen consensus achieved across the political spectrum. This cross-party consensus is important for German businesses: most enterprises are less worried by climate policy than by a politically unpredictable investment climate.

When the delegates of more than 190 countries meet in Paris next month the emissions reduction targets they put on the table will probably not suffice to keep global warming below 2 degrees. We know this because most nations have already declared their hand. This need not be a fatal flaw of a new global agreement on emissions reductions, as long as it provides a structure on which much more can be built.

We went down this same path when the growing hole in the ozone layer, and the resulting increase in UV radiation, precipitated global co-operation to phase out chlorofluorocarbons. The original Montreal Protocol on CFCs was far too weak, but it was subsequently tightened and proved to be one of our most effective international environmental instruments.

I also believe we now have a critical global mass of decarbonisation pioneers, both nations and businesses, that won't wait around for the laggards. China's lead is very important here. It is the world's largest emitter, but its government is well aware how threatened the country's future is by increasing drought, rising sea levels and the risk of stronger cyclones.

As a visitor to Australia, it feels like the country has moved backwards.

Back in the 1980s Australia was among the world's most enlightened countries regarding climate change. In 1990, its government decided to lower greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2005. But a concerted effort led by fossil fuel interests and aided by some media managed to sow doubt about man made climate change, and Australian emissions have kept rising.

Now, Australia is nearly the only industrial nation that for Paris has pledged emissions reductions that wouldn't even bring down its emissions significantly below the 1990 level by 2030. And it does not have the policies in place that would deliver even those modest reductions. Australia thus has much scope to improve – and it has fantastic renewable energy resources that make every German envious.

Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, will speak at Climate for Change, presented by UNSW and the Herald, at UNSW on Tuesday, November 10, 2015.

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/australia-must-step-up-on-emission-cuts-to-rejoin-worlds-enlightened-countries-20151103-gkpk5a.html

The One-Two Punch of Climate Change on the Great Barrier Reef

x x

Human handprint marks Australia's hottest year

Despite the Australian prime minister’s climate science scepticism, research funded by taxpayers has unanimously found man-made climate change guilty of causing the country’s record-breaking temperatures last year.

by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, October 3, 2014

LONDON − Scientists are fond of saying that it is difficult to pin the blame for any one climate event onto climate change. But they have just made an exception by reporting that many things that happened in Australia in 2013 bore the signature of man-made climate change.

In that one year, Australia recorded its hottest day ever, its hottest month in the history books, its hottest summer, its hottest spring, and its hottest year overall.

Extreme events

And in a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, examining extreme events around the world during 2013, a series of papers home in on the Australian heat waves, and identify a human influence.

“We often talk about the fingerprint of human-caused climate change when we look at extreme weather patterns,” said David Karoly, professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences. “This research across four different papers goes well beyond that.

“If we were climate detectives, then Australia’s hottest year on records in 2013 wasn’t just a smudged fingerprint at the scene of the crime, it was a clear and unequivocal handprint showing the impact of human-caused global warming.”

In general, the world’s meteorologists have found nothing unequivocal to suggest that global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion caused, for example, the Californian drought, extreme snow in the Spanish Pyrenees or an October blizzard in South Dakota in the US.

But they did find that global warming doubled the chance of severe heat waves in Australia − making extreme summer temperatures five times more likely, increasing the chance of drought conditions sevenfold, and making hot temperatures in spring 30 times more probable.

And they reckoned that the record hot year of 2013 would have been virtually impossible without global warming. At a conservative calculation, the science showed that the heat of 2013 was made 2,000 times more likely by global warming.

Different picture

Paradoxically, Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, was one of the world leaders who pointedly stayed away from the recent United Nations climate change summit in New York, and in the past has taken a sceptical stance on climate science. Yet research funded by Australian taxpayers has consistently painted a different picture.

“When it comes to what helped cause our hottest year on record, human-caused climate change is no longer a prime suspect − it is the guilty party,” said Dr Sophie Lewis, a paleoecologist at the Australian National University.

And her colleague, Sarah Perkins, a climate scientist at the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, warned that 2013 was only the beginning.

She said: “If we continue to put carbon into our atmosphere at the currently accelerating rate, years like 2013 will quickly be considered normal, and the impacts of future extremes will be well beyond anything modern society has experienced.” 

Australian insurance industry a stronghold against climate change

With a coast-dwelling populace, huge natural variability in rainfall and a heavy reliance on agriculture, Australia already feels the brunt of extreme weather more than most nations.

by Bernard Kellerman, Broker Buzz, Insurance Risk & Professional, September 3, 2014

All but one of the 20 largest property losses in the country in the past four decades have been weather-related and even though it accounts for just 2% of the global reinsurance market, Australia accounted for 6% of all losses in the five years to 2013.

There is near-universal consensus in the scientific community that climate change will cause more unpredictable and more extreme weather in the coming decades and that the process has already begun.

In Australia, that means more intense storms and storm surges, rising sea levels, wetter and drier extremes and increased flooding.

Insurance policies are typically issued on an annual basis but that hasn’t stopped insurers thinking long and hard about its impact and what role they can play.

In fact, Lloyd’s of London Head of Asia Pacific Kent Chaplin says: “The insurance industry sits at the forefront in helping to mitigate the impact of extreme weather.”

“Communities across Asia Pacific are highly exposed to these risks and catastrophe modelling firms and insurers need to account for surface sea level and air temperature rises in their modelling so we can better understand and prepare for their impact.

"Insurers can also help to strengthen defences against climate change by sharing our knowledge and expertise with the public sector to encourage climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies across the most vulnerable regions.”

Raising the stakes even higher is the fact demographic change keeps increasing the insurance sector’s exposure to adverse weather events, as explained by Allianz Australia Corporate Affairs General Manager Nicholas Scofield.

“The sea-changers and tree-changers have moved more property and assets into coastal areas and northern areas – for example, North Queensland – over recent decades,” he says.

“So, even if there was no change in the frequency of weather events, because we have more property exposed and the value of that property has gone up, any insurance claims will necessarily be higher than for similar events last century.”

Counting the cost

A recent report, compiled by Australia’s Climate Institute in association with consumer watchdog Choice, predicted that by 2050 the average home insurance premium could have almost doubled.

“There are a number of information barriers [to assessing true climate change effects on house prices] and we are saying that insurance premiums look like the canaries in the climate risk coal mine,” Climate Institute CEO John Connor says.

“It won’t be the same victims of natural disasters every time if the risk of extreme weather events and bushfires intensifies. That’s where the insurance sector has to make sure it’s in step with expectations.”

He says the problem is more of a property market failure than an insurance sector failure.

Further, some local governments continue to be reluctant to share detailed flood maps and other information that will allow more accurate risk assessment.

“Brokers, and the insurance industry generally, are the meat in the sandwich,” he says.

“The insurance companies, when they price premiums, are acting rationally.”

Pinpointed premiums

As average premiums increase, more granular risk data will become increasingly important as underwriters seek to sort out good risks from bad.

For instance, last year the Queensland Government announced it would share all its flood data with the industry, adding detail to many insurers’ already-sophisticated models.

Peter Jones, Zurich’s head of SME Underwriting, says flood cover can be offered sustainably for 95% of its business insurance policies, thanks to sophisticated flood data that has allowed his team to price risk accurately.

“That sounds great until you consider that less than 10% of properties have a flood risk and a large proportion of the 10% who don’t have flood cover are the ones most at risk of flood damage,” he says.

This, Allianz’s Nicholas Scofield suggests, is because severe flood risk can result in premiums that are five, 10 or 15 times the amount of premiums for similar houses that are not at risk.

After racking up $150 milliom in payouts for $4 million in premiums, Suncorp declared that homes and businesses in several central Queensland towns would not be offered in insurance.

“Our experience is that the vast majority of people most at risk will opt out of cover if they can," he says.

“This means brokers have a product that they can sell to someone with a high flood risk, but can’t afford to cover themselves for flood."

The downside of this is divergence in premiums, even for houses in adjacent streets, will become more common.

For example, in cyclone-prone areas, property premiums are influenced by the year of construction.

The dividing line for Allianz is 1982, when improved cyclone-proof building standards were introduced.

Now other factors are coming into play.

“The work on assessing flood risk means we are also able to look at whether properties are on flat land and close to the coast and determine if there is a storm surge risk when a cyclone hits,” Scofield says.

“Similarly, wind speeds increase as they move up the side of a hill increasing potential property damage.”

The majority of people in areas of low or medium to high risk will benefit most from the availability of more detailed data about flood risk for individual properties, as this gives insures more certainty in pricing, according to Colin Fagen, QBE Australia CEO.

However, there is more to be done by the industry as a whole, he suggests.

“With Australia’s exposure to natural perils, we need to focus more collaboratively on the preventative measures so we are reducing risk, particularly in relation to land development, risk awareness and mitigation initiatives.”

Karl Sullivan, the Insurance Council of Australia’s Policy Risk and Disaster Planning General Manager says, for instance, the industry is moving toward more precise assessment of bushfire risk at an address level, with better data on vegetation and landforms becoming more accessible.

This means of course that even before the climate noticeably dries out in some areas, as climate modelling has suggested, people in houses assessed as being highly vulnerable to bushfires are likely to see big loadings to their policies, much as people with flood-affected addressees have experienced, he warns.

“When it comes to address level rating for bushfire risk and premiums can be expected to diverge in much the same way as we have seen with flood cover,” Sullivan says.

The price to pay

Insurance affordability and boosting risk mitigation are two areas where the industry has been pushing hard.

“The argument shouldn’t really be about how insurers should lower their prices for people in high risk locations paying high premiums,” Sullivan says.

We need to focus more collaboratively on the preventative measures so we are reducing risk.

“It should be about listening to the price signal and working out how we can lower the probability of flooding for those people.”

One area where affordability can be increased is through tax reductions, not a popular topic in the current political environment, but one insurance industry leaders are keen to keep on the agenda.

“Numerous reviews, including the recent Henry Tax Review, have unanimously found that state taxes, duties and levies on insurance are inefficient to the point of being counterproductive,” QBE Australia CEO Colin Fagen says.

“Given the importance of insurance affordability and the implications of non- or under-insurance on the public purse, we believe it is time to act to remove all these specific imposts on insurance, as has previously been recommended.”

Insurance taxes are particularly regressive when one considers they are most keenly felt by those facing the largest risks, and therefore in most need of insurance.

When combined with the GST, taxes add around 20% to cost of premiums in many states, heightening unaffordability and lessening insurance’s reach where it is most needed.

However, an encouraging example is being set by the current ACT Government, which has been gaining industry praise for its progressive lowering of stamp duties on both life and general insurance products, with all such taxes to be abolished by 2016.

Leadership in promoting mitigation

Tax-free or not, insurance pricing plays a critical role in signalling to individuals, communities and government the existence and nature of specific risks.

Pricing should also encourage risk mitigation – either pushing developers to build to standards that will reduce the damage of a major weather event, or can amount to halting development in inappropriate areas, Fagen says.

NIBA CEO Dallas Booth agrees, and has been lobbying the Federal Government to grant the Council of Australian Governments greater powers to co-ordinate disaster mitigation planning on a national level.

The ICA’s Karl Sullivan says governments can drastically improve the built environment’s resistance to extreme weather in three ways.

“The first is land use planning; buildings need to be appropriate for their locations,” he says.

“The second side is building codes – they need to be updated to account for specific hazards, not just safety of life.

"You might get an incidental property protection benefit in a bushfire if the home is built to be “fireproof” for safety, but for most other hazards it’s just not taken into consideration.

"The third side is mitigation, to get the residual risk to property down to an acceptable level, by allowing actions such as clearing trees and undergrowth within a certain distance of homes."

Another industry leader, Suncorp Personal Insurance CEO Mark Milliner, has advocated strongly for more proactive government investment in mitigation infrastructure and changes to planning and building approval.

“Many communities in Queensland and Australia-wide could be better protected – and pay lower premiums – with the right funding and government policies,” he says.

And in the most unambiguous example of direct action, two years ago, after racking up $150 million in payouts for $4 million in premiums, Suncorp declared that homes and businesses in several central Queensland towns – notably Roma and Emerald – would not be offered insurance “unless clear decisions are made to build or implement improved mitigation to protect the residents of these towns.”

The move had the desired effect and so, once mitigation work began in Roma in September last year – 16 months after Suncorp pulled out – Milliner was there to announce the insurer would return to the town, but would be carefully reassessing risks until the levee was completed.

He suggested that premiums could fall by an average of 30%, and maybe by as much as 80%.

Broking through

While Australia’s insurance industry has been able to influence government policy and large-scale customer behaviour, through both lobbying and direct market actions, there is a well-defined role for individual insurance brokers in dealing with the consequences of adverse weather events.

“Brokers are in a unique position to educate their clients about dependencies they may have on suppliers to their business and the impact that could have to their business,” says Tony MacRae, Executive General Manager of Intermediary Distribution at QBE Australia.

That means explaining the value of business interruption insurance, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses, who quite often have greater dependencies upon their suppliers.

This increases the risk to their business in the event of a natural disaster.

MacRae also suggests advisers encourage their clients to develop a thorough contingency plan, including identifying alternative premises, alternative suppliers and alternative distribution channels.

There are also a range of other measures businesses of all sizes can take to protect themselves from increasingly volatile weather, such as ensuring buildings are designed to withstand the impacts of adverse weather, he added.

Insurance taxes are particularly regressive when one considers they are most keenly felt by those facing the largest risks, and therefore in most need of insurance.

In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change singles insurance out for a leadership role in preparing communities for climate change.

“Insurance can contribute positively to risk reduction by providing incentives to policy holders to reduce their risk profile,” the report states.

“Apart from constituting an autonomous private sector response to extreme events, insurance can also be framed as a form of social policy to manage climate risks, similar to New Zealand’s government insurance scheme; government measures to reduce or avoid risks also interact with insurance companies’ willingness to provide cover.

“Yet insurance can also act as a constraint on adaptation, if those living in climate-risk prone localities pay discounted or cross-subsidised premiums or policies fail to encourage betterment after damaging events by requiring replacement of ‘like for like’, constituting a missed opportunity for risk reduction.

“The effectiveness of insurance thus depends on the extent to which it is linked to a broader national resilience approach to disaster mitigation and response.”

http://www.insuranceandrisk.com.au/c0b1f8c0/Insurance_industry_a_stronghold_against_climate_change

Graham Readfearn: Climate sceptics see a conspiracy in Australia's record breaking heat

Bureau of Meteorology says claims from one climate sceptic that it has corrupted temperature data are false

by Graham Readfearn, "Planet Oz," The Guardian, August 27, 2014

Australia’s hottest year of 2013 started with a heatwave that caused widespread bush fires. In January the Holmes family from Tasmania took refuge under a jetty as wild fires raged around them. Photograph: Tim Holmes/AP

You could cut the triumphalism on the climate science denialist blogs right now with a hardback copy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Their unbridled joy comes not in the wake of some key research published in the scientific literature but in the fact that a climate sceptic has got a mainstream newspaper to give their conspiracy theory another airing.

The sceptic in question is Dr Jennifer Marohasy, a long-time doubter of human-caused climate change whose research at Central Queensland University (CQU) is funded by another climate change sceptic.

I chose the Nineteen Eighty-Four analogy in my introduction because it is one of Marohasy’s favourites. She likes to compare the work of the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) to the various goings on in Orwell’s fictional dystopian novel.

The conspiracy theory is that BoM is using a technique to selectively tamper with its temperature data so that it better fits with the global warming narrative.

The people at NASA are in on it too.

Now the great thing about conspiracy theories is that, for believers, attempts to correct the record just serve to reinforce the conspiracy. Like a video clip of the moon landing on a constant loop, the whole thing feeds back on itself.

Correspondence posted on Marohasy’s blog shows she has been pushing her claims for months that BoM has “corrupted the official temperature record so it more closely accords with the theory of anthropogenic global warming,” according to a letter she wrote to Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham, whose parliamentary secretary portfolio includes responsibility for the agency.

Marohasy lays it on thick in the letter, accusing the bureau of engaging in “propaganda” and littering the text with claims of “corruption.”

The Australian’s environment editor Graham Lloyd was approached to cover the “story” and stepped bravely forward with four pieces in recent days covering Marohasy’s claims.

Lloyd wrote there was now an “escalating row” over the “competence and integrity” of the BoM despite the fact that Marohasy has not published her claims in a peer reviewed journal (the two papers mentioned in Lloyd’s story actually relate to rainfall prediction, not temperature).

Yet this matters not.

The climate science denialists, contrarians and anti-environmental culture warriors are lapping it up with headlines like “Australia Government Climate Office Accused Of Manipulating Temperature Data” and “Australian Bureau of Meteorology Accused of Criminally Adjusting Global Warming.”

This evening the BoM has released a statement that explains the processes at the bureau. I’ve posted it in full at the bottom of this post, but here’s a quote:

Contrary to assertions in some parts of the media, the Bureau is not altering climate records to exaggerate estimates of global warming.

Homogenise this

The BoM maintains several sets of data on temperatures in Australia and the agency makes all that data available online.

One of those datasets is known as the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) and this is the one BoM used to declare 2013 was the hottest year on record.

Marohasy has been looking at some of the temperature stations that are included in ACORN-SAT and analysing the impact of a method known as “homogenisation” that the BoM sometimes employs with the ACORN-SATdata.

It’s no secret or even a revelation that the Bureau of Meteorology employs these techniques and others.

On the bureau’s website, anyone is free to lose themselves in a world of homogenised data sets, gridded temperature analysis and temporal homogeneity adjustments. Go for your life.

While Marohasy’s central claim – that BoM is doctoring figures to make them more acceptable to a narrative of warming - remains entirely untested in the scientific literature, the bureau’s methods used to compile ACORN-SAT have been peer reviewed.

Unusually, the bureau’s full response to one set of questions from Graham Lloyd has found its way onto at least one climate sceptic blog.

In the response the bureau explained why three specific site records it was asked about had been homogenised.

At Bourke, for example, the station had been moved three times in its history. Detective work had found that a noticeable shift in the readings in the 1950s had likely been due to changes in vegetation around the instrument.

At Amberley, the bureau noticed a marked shift in the minimum temperatures it had been recording, which was also likely due to the station being moved.

Another site at Rutherglen had data adjusted to account for two intervals – 1966 and 1974 – when it's thought the site was moved from close to buildings to low-flat ground.

Marohasy wants heads to roll [rolls eyes] because she claims that the Rutherglen site was never moved and so there was no need to homogenise the data.

However, the bureau has documentary evidence showing that sometime before the 1970s the weather station was not in the place where it is now.

The bureau had initially spotted a break or jump in the data that pointed to a likely move at Rutherglen.

Perhaps all of these movements of temperature stations was a conspiracy in itself, cooked up in the 1950s?

Professor Neville Nicholls, of Monash University, worked at BoM for more than 30 years and from 1990 until he left in 2005 had led efforts to analyse rainfall and temperature readings from across the country. He told me:

The original raw data is all still there – it has not been corrupted. Anyone can go and get that original data.

Pre-1910 there was not much of a spread but also there was more uncertainty about how the temperatures were being measured. By 1910, most temperatures were being measured in a Stevenson Screen. A lot of measurements were taken at Post Offices but in many cases these were moved out to airports around the middle of the 20th century. That produces artificial cooling in the data.

Towns for example in coastal New South Wales originally had temperatures taken near the ocean because that’s where the town was. But as the town grew the observations would move inland and that is enough to affect temperature and rainfall.

Are we supposed to just ignore that? A scientist can’t ignore those effects. It’s not science to just go ahead and plot that raw data.

Nicholls said if people didn’t trust the way the BoM was presenting the data they could look elsewhere, such as a major project known as Berkeley Earth undertaken by former sceptic Professor Richard Muller which also used BoM data from as early as 1852 to mid-2013.

A chart from the Berkeley Earth analysis of global temperatures used data from the Bureau of Meteorology to reconstruct average temperatures for Australia going back to 1852. Photograph: Berkeley Earth

Sceptic funding

Before joining CQU, Marohasy spent many years working at the Institute of Public Affairs – a Melbourne-based, free-market think tank that has been promoting climate science denialism for more than two decades.

After leaving there, she became the chair of the Australian Environment Foundation, a spin-off from the IPA.

Marohasy has said that Bryant Macfie, a Perth-based climate science sceptic, funds her research at Central Queensland University.

In 2008, after Macfie had gifted $350,000 to the University of Queensland in a donation facilitated by the IPA to pay for environmental research scholarships there, he wrote that science had been corrupted by a “newer religion” of environmentalism.

In June, Marohasy made her claims about BoM to the Sydney Institute. In July she travelled to Las Vegas to speak at the Heartland Institute’s gathering of climate science denialists and assorted contrarians.

The Heartland Institute is the “free market” think tank that once ran a billboard advert with a picture of terrorist and murderer Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski alongside the question: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do You?”

Also speaking in Las Vegas was federal MP for the Queensland electorate of Dawson, George Christensen, who appeared on a panel alongside Marohasy.

Christensen described mainstream climate science as “a lot of fiction dressed up as science.”

Data shows warming

Dr Lisa Alexander, the chief investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, explained that in Australia it was not uncommon for temperature stations to be moved, often away from urban environments.

She said that, for example, sites moved only a kilometre or so to more exposed areas such as airports would tend to record lower temperatures.

That then creates a jump in the time series that’s not related to a jump in the climate. The bureau is altering the temperature data to remove those non-climatic effects that are due to changes like new instrumentation or site movements.

Is the bureau fiddling the figures to fit with a global warming conspiracy? No! Are they amending the records to make them consistent through time? Yes.

Also included in the BoM’s statement comes the following graph that overlays 18 different sets of temperature data for Australia – including (in yellow) another BoM dataset which is not homogenised. The graph also includes temperature measurements by satellite.

Now either the satellites are also in on the warming conspiracy, or there’s something else going on. I wonder what that might be?

Comparison of 18 different sources of temperature data between 1911 and 2010 including from adjusted and unadjusted data and from analyses from international authorities. Photograph: Bureau of Meteorology, Australia

Here is the Bureau’s statement in full.

Contrary to assertions in some parts of the media, the Bureau is not altering climate records to exaggerate estimates of global warming.

Our role is to make meteorological measurements, and to curate, analyse and communicate the data for use in decision making and to support public understanding.

To undertake these tasks, the Bureau employs highly skilled technicians and scientists and invests in high quality monitoring equipment.

The Bureau measures temperature at nearly 800 sites across Australia, chiefly for the purpose of weather forecasting. The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) is a subset of this network comprising 112 locations that are used for climate analysis. The ACORN-SAT stations have been chosen to maximise both length of record and network coverage across the continent. For several years, all of this data has been made publicly available on the Bureau’s web site.

Temperature records are influenced by a range of factors such as changes to site surrounds (e.g., trees casting shade or influencing wind), measurement methods and the relocation of stations (e.g., from a coastal to more inland location). Such changes introduce biases into the climate record that need to be adjusted for prior to analysis.

Adjusting for these biases, a process known as homogenisation, is carried out by meteorological authorities around the world as best practice, to ensure that climate data is consistent through time.

At the Bureau’s request, our climate data management practices were subject to a rigorous independent peer-review in 2012. A panel of international experts found the Bureau’s data and methods were amongst the best in the world.

The Bureau’s submissions to the review were published on the Bureau’s website, as were the findings of the review panel.

The Bureau’s methods have also been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Both the raw and adjusted ACORN-SAT data and the larger unadjusted national data set all indicate that Australian air temperatures have warmed over the last century. This finding is consistent with observed warming in the oceans surrounding Australia. These findings are also consistent with those of other leading international meteorological authorities, such as NOAA and NASA in the United States and the UK MetOffice. The high degree of similarity is demonstrated in Figure 1 (above).

The Bureau strives to ensure that its data sets and analysis methods are as robust as possible. For this reason we place considerable emphasis on quality assurance, transparency and communication. The Bureau welcomes critical analysis of the Australian climate record by others through rigorous scientific peer review processes.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/aug/27/climate-sceptics-see-a-conspiracy-in-australias-record-breaking-heat